John Tyler, Spanning the Republic

Dude!

John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States, may not have been a particularly remembered executive (except perhaps as the trailing end of “Tippacanoe and Tyler Too“), but he, his children, and grandchildren quite nearly cover the span of the American nation. Tyler himself was born in March, 1790, just over a year after the Constitution, having been duly ratified, came into force. He lived until 1862, dying in the greatest test of that nation (and also the war of the greatest American general, although Tyler tried to join up the wrong side).

During that life, he fathered fifteen children, the latest, Pearl Tyler, coming only two years before his death in 1860. Her mother, Tyler’s second wife, Julia, was thirty years John’s junior. The youngest children of that union, Lyon, Robert, and Pearl, lived well into the 20th century, Pearl dying the last of all in 1947.

Two of Lyon Tyler’s son are, as of 2012, still alive, and living in the ancestral mansion “Sherwood Forest,” Lyon Jr., and Harrison. They are the third generation of a family that spans the Republic (and is trending on Twitter), and makes it personal in their memories. I can’t help but imagine that it is that deep sense of America that informs Harrison Tyler’s judgment of Newt Gingrich: he’s a “big jerk.”

It’s positively constitutional, it is.

(Full genealogy here).

This is a blue car.

The DSCC will give you a bumper sticker saying “This is a blue car” for your $5 donation. That’s a pretty good bumper sticker. But if you really wanted to be a brie-snorting decadent coastal fifth columnist, as a friend points out, it would say, “Ceci n’est pas une voiture rouge.”

Bob Dole was always kind of a realist.

The best part of Bob Dole’s sandbagging of Newt Gingrich – and a distinctly Doleful touch – is this passage:

if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney

Not, mind you, “if we want to win” – just “if we want to avoid an Obama landslide.”

Just say no.

Loooong-time readers of this blog will be unsurprised that I agree with Charles Pierce about Tim Thomas’s right to refuse an invitation to the White House. Thomas’s politics aren’t mine. In fact I’ll go so far as to say they’re loopy. But it’s perfectly honorable to say “no thank you” to a White House invitation for political reasons. Especially when you do it with reasonable class.

I think I’d be softer on an invitation to a private function. One does perhaps have a duty to advise a president. But ceremonial functions are fair game for refusals as statements.

Roald Dahl, Aldous Huxley, JG Ballard, and lots of others have turned down an hono(u)r from the Crown.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Glazier.

Near the beginning of the new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, just after he gets kicked out of the Circus, George Smiley gets a new pair of glasses.¹ In contrast to the horn-rims he’s been wearing, the new frames are squarish bifocals that magnify his eyes.² They remind us Smiley has, in exile, become a watcher, rather than a player.³ He’s removed from the action, behind glass.

And throughout the movie, so are we.

An occupation for education.

The occupation of UC Berkeley’s anthropology library ended Saturday evening when campus administrators agreed to meet the demands of protesters and restore the library’s hours.

A Footnote For Him On The Way To Greater Things

What did you say your name was?

Reading this Wall Street Journal article about Newt Gingrich’s short but odd career as a history professor,* I felt the need to explore what the other people in the story were thinking. Obviously, I have no direct knowledge of West Georgia College or the people there, but I have been at an academic institution for a while.

In addition to the normal application materials, Gingrich submitted his reading list for the last three months to the history department at WGC. He had read 26 books, though they were “too eclectic for a specialist” Gingrich confessed in his letter to the department. Nonetheless, Benjamin Kennedy, the chair, talked to him on the phone, thought he sounded nice, and hired him. Even early on, Gingrich was not shy:

A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled “Some Projections on West Georgia College’s Next Thirty Years.”

According to a history professor, this “‘drew a chuckle’” from administrators. Gingrich did not get the job, needless to say, but he applied undeterred for the chairship of the history department when it came open the next year. This was not funny. It was one thing to apply for the Presidency, but presumptuous to apply for a job with real power. Gingrich’s application was not greeted “so kindly.” Kennedy ruefully recalled him as being “Well, he seemed pretty energetic, young, ambitious. God, always that.”

At this point, there seems (I speculate) to have been a meeting of minds between the administration and the history department on how to distract Gingrich into less bothersome pursuits. The answer? A committee!

The so-called Grand Experiment is a big lie.

Or so it seems. No, I’m not talking about Joe Paterno again [spits]. I’m talking about the description of the United States as a Grand Experiment in democracy or sometimes as a lower-case grand experiment in democracy. I always assumed that one of the founders* said that, that it was a quote in other words. But no, it seems that’s not the case. Unless I’m missing something — which is entirely possible; no, really, it’s entirely possible — the whole thing is a charade.

* Probably Jefferson [spits], right? I mean, he’s usually the guy who said the stuff about the things, isn’t he? But apparently not in this case. Unless, again, I’ve missed something. Which is to say, this is chance for you to note that somebody is Wrong on the Internet! And not just any somebody, but me.

In still another country.

If you don’t hear the key phrase here in John Cleese’s French accent, you’re dead inside.

The bill also would criminalize ‘outrageous minimization’ of the Armenian genocide.

Garton Ash, presumably wearing his poker face, points out only that “minimization” will be hard to figure, leaving out “outrageous” altogether.

It is a noteworthy specimen of pundit lit.

David Greenberg’s review of Chris Matthew’s new Kennedy biography is, like everything Greenberg writes, worth reading. It’s a wonderful takedown, I think, because it’s not entirely captivated by the search for the perfect snark (they’re wily, snarks are, and should be hunted at dawn and dusk, when they typically rest).

That said, I wonder about these passages and what follows in a similar vein:

So completely does talking constitute Matthews’s raison d’être that he mistakes it for historical research.

There is nothing wrong, needless to say, with conducting interviews, and they can be invaluable for journalists trying to set down a first draft of history. But the farther one reaches into the past, the less precise and clear memories become; and while they can provide help when existing records are unreliable or deficient, they have to be used with care.

I don’t think Greenberg intended this as an attack on oral history — because, as he intimates, Matthews isn’t an oral historian in any meaningful sense of that title — but I do find myself reading the review as an endorsement of the idea that historians should, whenever possible, be using documentary records and, as Greenberg says outright, leaving interviews to journalists. I wish Greenberg had delved a bit deeper into this point, particularly the relationship between oral history and the fallibility of memory. The idea that written sources have more truth value, or perhaps a greater capacity to illuminate the past, than oral histories, interests me, but I’m pretty sure I’m less convinced by that argument than Greenberg appear to be.

My general rule is that all sources — written, oral, etc. — should be treated like hostile witnesses. Which is to say, I’m skeptical of anything my sources tell me and, as a result, seek context and corroboration whenever I can. I suspect Greenberg would agree with that proposition, so perhaps I’m making something of nothing.

Harvard Loses*

I have no love for Rick Santorum, but the Times’ lead on the Iowa caucuses recount is quite impressive in its naked slant towards Romney:

Mitt Romney’s eight-vote victory in the Iowa caucuses will be rescinded on Thursday, following a two-week review by the state’s Republican Party that found that Rick Santorum actually finished 34 votes ahead of Mr. Romney, two party officials confirmed.

So Romney was the winner when he was ahead by eight votes, but Santorum only “finished…ahead” when his lead was 34? The Times might defend itself by pointing out that the Iowa GOP isn’t going to certify a winner because they can’t be sure of votes from eight precincts, but, as Nate Silver pointed out, Santorum almost doubled Romney’s total in those precincts when counted on caucus night. The Times does not mention that. I guess being the presumptive nominee has its advantages.**

*There was a joke in my house growing up that the Times would not report things about Cornell particularly well. It was that “upstate” school. The classic example was that a Cornell victory over Harvard in football (rare enough!) would be reported by the paper as “Harvard Loses.”

**Though I’m sure that Gail Collins will connect Iowa to Romney’s dog, somehow.

God bless the do-re-mi.

Kevin Kruse brings the historicizing to Mitt Romney’s effort to unite us, under God.

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This opposition of God to the New Deal is of course specious: God was a member of FDR’s Brains Trust and in His incarnation as Jesus Christ and author of the beatitudes He directly influenced the New Deal’s relief provisions. As for the public works, He explained, “Yes, I could have built ’em quicker, but only by robbing the economy of much-needed stimulus.”

I Go To The Wrong Conferences

Any conference report that includes “but the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient” is worth an extended read. The presenter–one Professor Brindley–was experimenting with cures for erectile dysfunction. His strategy involved the wince-inducing method of direct penile injection. He was not content with merely showing slides:

He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.

Suddenly, Powerpoint doesn’t seem that bad.

Mark Wahlberg counterfactualizes the shit out of some history. Because he’s just that ripped.

If Mark Wahlberg had been seated in first class on that fateful day, there would have been no 9/11. Yes, seriously. I dare you to challenge his logic.

In another country.

the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes

Don’t get excited, fellow Americans – in the UK. A country where a physicist, Brian Cox, can have a prime time television special featuring major stars. A country with crap reality tv, tabloid press, and science. Behold.

Higher learning.

Mitt Romney is flacking for his campaign donor’s business, “Full Sail University.” I eagerly await even one of our leaders sending his children to such an outfit.

Grassy Knolls All Over The Place

Received in the mail on Friday, by a fellow EotAW blogger-person:

Required for my spring course on “Conspiracy theories in American History.”

Process, Part II

[First post here]

But if laptops replaced paper as the main way of getting notes down, the difference in the actual physical process of research was not that much altered. Go to the archive, order the sources you needed, and spend days or weeks or months taking notes on them. Copying costs at most archives were much too high to consider wholesale reproduction, and so note-taking depended on how fast you could type. Portable scanners did not really work; either one had to put the document face down on the scanner or drag the scanner along the document. Neither of those things pleased most archivists. In addition, the scanners were slow and did not offer much storage. Thus, note taking remained resolutely textual, and resulted in the production of lots and lots of MS Word documents with notes on specific sources.

That changed dramatically with the advent of digital cameras with high resolution, storage, and battery life. Suddenly, I could buy, relatively cheaply, a lightweight camera able to take hundreds of shots at a resolution that, properly framed, could be read with relative ease on a monitor back home. This advance came too late for A War of Frontier and Empire, but I decided to convert entirely over to using a digital camera for The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, 1900. This was encouraged by the birth of my daughter Madeline, whose arrival meant that long research trips, while restful, did not contribute to domestic harmony.

But what kind of camera? I thought about getting a DSLR, but quickly discarded the idea. This was going to be an experiment, and paying over a thousand dollars for a camera to do it seemed excessive. Instead, I decided on a smaller camera, a “point and shoot.” After a fair amount of Internet research, I settled on the Canon SD800. It got good reviews, took a detailed picture (without being too large), and was reasonably priced. I equipped it with the largest memory card I could (512 MB at first; now up to 4 GB, which translates to about 3000 pictures), and set off.

From the first moment in the archive, I was ecstatic.

I Am Pleased

It pleases me that the 12th place finisher in the Republican primary in New Hampshire was…Barack Obama.

Socialism is alive and well in the GOP.

(Of course, that’s a slippage from his 2008 result, when he finished 7th in the Republican primary, and a severe slippage from John Kerry’s 2004 result when he came second)

Process

The biggest changes in my research since I became a historian have come about because of the usefulness of laptops and digital cameras. When I started doing scholarly research, note-taking was still done using pen and paper (or pencil and paper for particularly careful archives). In the 1990s, however, computers suddenly became really portable, and could be carried into the archive and used to take notes. Suddenly, my high school typing class really started to pay off: ten fingers of typing madness.

My first real research workhorse was a PowerBook 160, 7 lbs and 25 MHz of raw computing power. Allied with a homebrewed Filemaker Pro database, this laptop carried me through a large chunk of my dissertation research. The main limitations on the PowerBook were its battery life (circa two hours) and the range of restrictions that archives put on the use of laptops. The former meant that there was often a mad rush for available outlets by scholars (the old British Library was particularly difficult; if you didn’t get there by 9 am, you weren’t getting a seat in the one row with available plugs). The latter meant that I had to be careful to check with each archive on what they would allow before visiting. The PowerBook did have an unexpected benefit: it got warm when being used, which was nice in archives with less than sufficient winter insulation (yes, I’m looking at you, Colindale).

Figuring out the process happened piecemeal. I didn’t plan ahead of time how to use the new technology, I just took it with to the archives and tried to use it. That meant that the laptop became an electronic notepad/typewriter at first, but I quickly began to figure out ways to use it to better advantage. I learned to program Filemaker, to set up ways to make each note individual and linked to a source citation. I figured out ways to use keywords so that I could gather the individual records into larger groups when I needed to use them. Later, as I was writing, I figured out how to apportion records to particular chapters. The result was barebones, primitive, and resolutely black and white:

The above was a personal memoir of a British soldier in the First World War from the Imperial War Museum.

This was an entry for Martin Ceadel’s book on pacifism in Britain in WWI.

The second record comes from a later iteration of the database and the improvements are evident. In an odd sense, the research notebook grew with the research, sprouting new features and new abilities as I went along. The advantage was that I could do more with it. The disadvantage was that retrofitting a feature left a fair number of earlier entries out, and it was often difficult to update them. Nor, I should note, did I particularly learn the lessons of this impromptu development. I’ve continued to adopt new technology but have essentially figured out how to use it as I go along. There are any number of my scholarly tools, electronic and otherwise, that have been fitted and retrofitted, made for one purpose and then pushed to do another.

Next: digital cameras.